growing wiser: pick your portal at Paul’s place
Wondering where your group fits in the world’s largest movement? You know, the one now merging the 1.5 million groups dealing with ecological restoration and social justice.
Well, chances are you’ll never know unless you enter your own info at WiserEarth, a new project of the Natural Capital Institute and sister site for Paul Hawken‘s new book, Blessed Unrest.
Why? Because staff at the World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility have so far seeded the interactive directory with only 100,000 org entries.
Realizing they couldn’t possibly do all the research or legwork needed to grow the database to include all the groups they believe are out there, WiserEarth has opened up the system so that, like Wikipedia, anyone can create or edit an organization’s profile.
And they have added tools that make it easy for organizations to use the database for their own purposes.
Calling it the most advanced search tool available in the environmental and social justice fields, WiserEarth enables anyone to add a resource or an organization, share events on the calendar or post a job opening, connect with others through an Area of Focus portal or a discussion forum, give feedback and share ideas, ask a volunteer community member for help, and find helpful answers at the FAQs.
WiserEarth contains 416 portals representing various ‘Areas of Focus’ that allow you to link your personal interests to organizations, jobs, events, and resources throughout the world.
The WISER Platform is the technology that makes this possible. Using MySQL open source database as its backbone, all recorded information on WiserEarth is searchable, filterable, and fully referenced, leading visitors directly to the organizational record or website of interest.
Users who access the site will have online links to NGOs that maintain a web presence, as well as the many thousands of organizations that do not have a web presence. Filtering of structured data results in more useful query results.
Any questions?
Did I mention this is the sister site for Paul Hawken’s new book?
WiserEarth is definitely a community directory and networking forum worth populating.
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